A. E. Hotchner: Papa Hemingway

...He keeps telling us he was "very poor," though he and his wife kept a maid and took extensive vacations...

...Should the world be permitted to misunderstand for a moment, the reflection will come back coward, and the campaign is doomed...

...For a writer, such an inability amounts to grave ignorance, but Hemingway was not about to see that...

...second, use them to write off fear...

...His recipe doesn't work...

...For he does his work alone, and if he is a good enough writer, he must face eternity or the lack of it each day...

...There, thank God, the fear does not go away...

...With eternity in view the Hero raises horn to lips...

...We read in A Moveable Feast how careful he was to "learn" from every place he went and every person he met...

...Enter a band of loyal followers, bearing condiments and leeches, ready to shore a man up...

...The would-be Hero can write it, but he cannot write it off...

...Anyway he felt poor, and in con stant danger of letting out more than he took in...

...It is as though the audience that he had worked so hard to control turned around in his mind to control him...

...The artist must go one step further...

...I had forgotten," remarks Hotchner, "how he distrusted chance and how he planned fun as seriously as work, for he considered them of equal importance to Well-Being...

...He conceives of a character named "Hemingway" whose bravery would be verified by everything around him, ultimately by the whole world...

...Enter the faithful Hotchner, self-conscious about his tape-recorder—until the Hero urges him to turn it on...

...He was too busy trying to build his fortress against dread, an entire life as hermetic as a work of art...

...Hotchner reports that Hemingway pretended he had to live each year on that year's income, and was deeply anxious about it long after his annual royalties could have supported a hundred writers...

...There is a certain kind of American, however, who is tempted to become a character instead of a novelist and to make of his own life a heroic novel...

...Luckily the Hero is not identical with the actual writer who gave us the delicate poetry of courage, isolation, and death which informs Hemingway's early work and the best of his later stories...

...Had he succeeded, he would have mastered the world...

...experience was a meal to be carefully consumed and given back to the world in tight little pellets of gut prose...

...We have here the Hero's program: first, learn the right things...

...For until every person and event and even every memory return to the Hero the selfsent image of his Heroism, how can he be sure he is not merely kidding himself, because he is, at bottom, still afraid...

...The pseudo-folky, he-man dialogue that sounded so intellectually and humanly inadequate when reported by Lillian Ross is given here by Hotchner at full length, and still sounds just as inadequate...

...The Hero writes, as he grows older, to combat misunderstanding...

...His great weakness was his inability to relax now and then into mere mortality...

...Hotchner describes an automobile trip through France, in which Hemingway gave a town-by-town commentary on "local terrain, weather, customs, history, battles, grain, grapes, orchards, song birds, game birds, wines, dishes, cattle, wild flowers, morality, architecture, irrigation, government, and accessibility of local women to outsiders...

...Most writers try to use their writing as the medium through which they come to terms with the world around them...

...To look into the mirage of shifting styles, fashions, and personalities, and see reflected there the constant esteem of one's own self: that is the godly ambition of the American Celebrity-Hero, and it requires a godly effort at manipulation...

...Or, as Hemingway told the Swedish Academy: "He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates...

...Once he made of himself a full-time Hero, it was appropriate—in the dramatic sense only—that Hemingway should have succumbed at last to the paranoid fear that others were out to get him, to expose him personally and undermine him financially...

...Since Fate will never give in, the Hero is never satisfied...

...In Hemingway's case, the Hero is the masculine adventurer who has, as quoted by Hotchner, "learned some things that have helped me write oil fear as a personal problem...

...But we see now what we had only glimpses of before—that there is a cunning, crafty, full-blooded artist making up this dialogue, for a logical and consistent, though tragically misguided, reason...

...it only produces good writing...

...Hemingway was the Tom Sawyer of his devoted group, who never let up for a moment in directing his planned fun, except to tell anecdotes in which he had stored the fun of the past...

...Here, as throughout, one's awe of Hemingway's prodigious capacity for detail only intensifies one's frustration with his emotional narrowness...

...Hotchner joined the party in 1948, long after it had gotten out of hand, when much of the host's writing and nearly all his co:iversation consisted of instructions for getting the most out of life...

...In his worshipful innocence, Hotchner exposes in abundance the compulsive pettiness that so often accompanies literary ambition...

...A psychiatrist whom Hotchner consulted in his friend's behalf "speculated that Ernest's fears of impoverishment and of being in jeopardy physically and legally were probably related to his feelings of impoverishment as a writer, with attendant jeopardy of his identity and stature...

...His vitality was programmatic, rather than generous...

...Enter a good many reporters and critics, bent on tearing a man down, ignoring his very own explanations...

...Instead, he found himself the world's victim, with nothing of his own left inside him, and nothing more to do but destroy the physical shell of himself...

...Even as a young man, Hemingway was obsessed with taking things in and storing them...

...In jeopardy or out of it, fearful or free of fear, losing weight or full of food and drink and life, Hemingway never ceased to carry on his own ver sion of the good fight against all odds "If I can't live on my own terms, then existence is impossible," he told Hotchner towards the end...

...Writ ing is always connected with eating and drinking, and the production of Hemingway's daily quota of numbered words is elaborately dovetailed with the consumption of specifically chosen delicacies...